This invention relates to a revenue management system that has an in-memory write-through cache.
Prepaid phone accounts are tracked in real-time by billing and time management hardware and software architectures in communication with the phone network switch. The architecture approves the customer's call if there are sufficient funds in the customer's prepaid account. If the customer runs out of time on his prepaid account during a call, the architecture acts to terminate the call.
These architectures are known as customer relation management (CRM) systems. CRM systems are also used for non-prepaid scenarios, such as for generating bills. CRM systems are also used for other telecommunications, and other network management scenarios.
Prepaid account CRM systems need to have the ability to track accounts in real-time. Available real-time architectures for managing prepaid customer accounts have some existing limitations.
First, the available architectures require high performance and data throughput, thereby leading to relatively high hardware requirements. These architectures, along with their storage and maintenance can be expensive and time-consuming.
Second, requirements for very low system response latencies are difficult to achieve. Transactions in existing architectures involve several round-trips-to the disk-based storage subsystem. The data must be processed by a comparatively large software stack to transform from a relational representation into a physical storage format.
Third, in an available architecture, the data is transferred several times from component to component of the system to retrieve the data, map it from a relational format to an object format, process it with the desired business logic, and then transfer the response to the client.
Fourth, currently available architectures can not provide desired levels of data availability to the public phone network (e.g., the switch). The close connection of a prepaid CRM system to the public network increases the data availability requirements. Being part of the public network, some parts of the system need to have carrier-grade availability.
Also, no single product accomplished both batch processing and real-time processing for telecommunications CRM (e.g., billing) purposes.